


my peace has always depended (on all the ashes in my wake)

by aletterinthenameofsanity



Series: author's favorites [66]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting, Blood, Brenner as President Snow, Careers (Hunger Games), Character Death, Fluff and Angst, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Mentors, Multi, Nancy Jonathan and Steve are Victors of different Games, Nancy is from District Two, POV Nancy Wheeler, Polyamory, Prostitution, You're Welcome, bringing you yet another hunger games AU, heavily inspired by "Tales from District Two", in that order, not main characters but a lot of minor death, surviving after your games
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-06-28 06:49:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19806937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aletterinthenameofsanity/pseuds/aletterinthenameofsanity
Summary: Some nights, Steve’s side of the bed is empty, and Nancy knows what President Brenner is making him do. So she sets an alarm to get up early and has coffee, a shower, and a blanket ready for when he gets home, because she can’t stop this from happening but she can sure as hell make it better afterwards.In turn, he does the same for her on the nights where she has to grit her teeth and go out, because the Capitol doesn’t value piano playing half as much as they value her spreading her legs for them.Then Jonathan shows up for his half-month visits and he’s there for both her and Steve, cooking his mother’s favorite soup recipes, and she kisses Jonathan as he stirs the pot. He takes photos of her and Steve around the apartment, capturing what he calls their “good angles.” Steve chases Jonathan around the living room and kitchen until he reaches Jonathan and tackles him with tickles.Through all of this, Nancy’s heart will grow and grow until it feels fit to burst. She knows this can’t last, that this fragile relationship can be blown up at any moment by the Capitol, but she just sinks into it for now, letting her be as happy as she can be.(Nancy, from the Sixty Ninth Games to the Quarter Quell.)





	my peace has always depended (on all the ashes in my wake)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lorata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorata/gifts), [scoutshonour](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scoutshonour/gifts), [chrissyeccly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chrissyeccly/gifts).
  * Inspired by [we have the time](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18435773) by [scoutshonour](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scoutshonour/pseuds/scoutshonour). 
  * Inspired by [Fixed to a Star](https://archiveofourown.org/works/655081) by [lorata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorata/pseuds/lorata). 



> Title is from "Arsonist's Lullabye" by Hozier.
> 
> Alright, this fic would not exist without either lorata's "Tales of District 2" series or scoutshonour's "we have the time," both of which I spent the past week binge-reading. lorata's work greatly informed the world-building of District 2, though there are a few differences between my world-building and hers, and scoutshonour's work is the one and only reason I'm finally writing a stoncy fic as it's what drove me head-first back into what is probably my first ever poly ship.
> 
> Also, I have never wanted to design an "moodboard" for a fic more than I have this one, so that should probably say something.

_Somehow, even in the worst of times, the tiniest fragments of good survive._

_It was the grip in which one held those fragments that counted._

― **Melina Marchetta**

The first thing Nancy Wheeler learns when she enters the District Two training Centre is that she is a natural with a gun, a natural markswoman from the tender age of ten. 

However, she never really ends up training with a gun, as the trainer says, voice matter-of-fact, that, “There’s no way in hell that the Gamemakers will let you have a gun in the Arena.”

Therefore, Nancy ends up training with a different projectile weapon instead. Knives become her weapon of choice, and she’s absolutely deadly with them. Soon enough she becomes the best knife-wielder in the entire Centre, because she puts her all into what she does. Nancy is always the first person up, the person who always pays the most attention in class, the best at everything she tries because she can’t afford not to be the best.

-

Nancy Wheeler knows how dangerous the Hunger Games can be, not just objectively but personally, as well. Last year, the girl tribute from District Two was none other than Nancy's friend Barb, and last year, the Victor was not from District 2.

Thus, this year, when they call for volunteers, Nancy steps forward with her head held high and Enobaria’s blessing on her back to announce her bid for the Sixty Ninth Games. She’s going in there to make sure that District Two pulls a win this year, that he brother has extra food, so that Barb didn’t die in vain.

(To show Panem that Enobaria can pull a win, that she may be a bit crazy but that doesn’t mean she’s not Victor-crazy.)

-

Nancy’s interview goes well, with her playing the angle of not a mad killer in a dress, but a determined one.

(“You can’t pull off mad unless you want to play the Games that way _and_ want to live the rest of your life that way,” Enobaria said, during the weeks leading up to the Reaping. “If you plan on being clever- which I know you are, your scores show it- you can’t go in being mad, if you expect to keep the sponsors on your side when you play your hand. You have to keep them on your side, and you can’t do that by double-crossing them with your image.”

Nancy had to wonder, not for the first time, why she was Enobaria’s first tribute, what Enobaria had seen in her to push to be her mentor. If Nancy’s going for the endgoal of coming out as a smart and determined Victor, not a mad one, then Lyme or Nero would have worked a lot better as her mentor, not one of the most famously insane Victors Two has ever produced.

But she didn’t ask Enobaria _why_ , instead just nodding in agreement. She needed to focus her mental energy at the task coming up in the next few weeks, not on questioning her Mentor’s decisions.)

“So, Nancy,” Caesar says with a smile the color of the green protein shakes they kept feeding her in the Centre but that never really seemed to take hold on her thin limbs. “What are you planning to do in the Arena?”

Nancy thinks of her brother, her sister, and her mother. “I'm willing to do whatever it takes to win,” she says to Caesar, proud and without reservation, and he smiles that stupid green-lipsticked grin of his, the grin she needs to get sponsors.

“I’m glad to hear that, Nancy,” he says.

-

It takes exactly three days in the Arena for Nancy to figure out two major things that will determine her fate in the games. 

One, that she is not going to win this competition on brute strength. The boy from One will win in any possible situation in a one-on-one fight between the two of them, what with his skill at the longsword and all. Her knives won't do shit against a longer, stronger close-combat weapon. 

Two, that the mutts in her Arena are attracted to the scent of blood.

And Nancy, who was taught to take any advantage given to her, knows the possibilities. She knows that there are very few ways to win the Games, that there are very few ways to survive, and two Twos never end up in the final duel together and that if her and One end up in the final match, she isn’t coming home. She knows that she has to take any chance possible to end up in the Final Two without the boy from One there.

So it happens that, on the fifth night in the Games, a couple of days before the pack is set to disintegrate, Nancy takes a risk. When it's her turn to stand guard over the Career's camp, she slashes open the palm of her non-dominant hand and drips all over her fellow sleeping tributes, getting her blood in their hair and on their clothes, where it will take them awhile to notice it. Then she binds up the wound tightly, utilizing a thick bandage from one of the survival backpacks, grabs a few supplies and rations, stuffs them into the backpack, straps the remaining knives and a few sundry weapons to her, and then takes off, leaving her bloodied knife by the sleeping bodies of her fellow Careers. Behind her, in the distance, she hears the howls of mutts, which she ignores as best she can.

When she hears for cannons boom within a couple of hours, she breathes a sigh of relief. It is only her and a few outlier tributes left in this game, and she knows that she can beat that, easy. It's only a question of how fast.

-

Nine days later, Nancy Wheeler is announced the Victor of the Sixty Ninth Hunger Games after she slits open the throat of the little girl from Nine, and there are a few scrapes on her knuckles and face, exhaustion in her bones, and seven official kills to her name (not counting the Careers) but she’s _won_ and that’s what matters.

-

Nancy wakes up in a hovercraft with all of her knife-callouses and Arena scars missing, along with a third of her hair. Her prep team has restyled her hair, given her a head of short bouncy curls where her ponytail used to lie, and they tell Nancy that she’s pretty and she kind of wants to scream because she knows what that means.

(No Two ever wants to be _pretty_. They want to be intimidating, want to be dangerous and volatile, but she was too clever for a Two and thus this is her punishment.)

-

Some of the Career Victors call her win dishonorable. Most of the Centre and her fellow District 2 citizens agree.

But Enobaria finds Nancy after the Games, puts a hand on her shoulder, looks her in the eye, and says, “You survived. You won. And they can never take that from you.”

(Enobaria’s fangs glimmer in the light of the hallway, and Nancy knows that there are many things that the Capitol took away from Enobaria that she can never get back, that this is something she knows what she’s talking about.)

For her Coronation, Nancy’s stylist abandons the delicate pink thing he put her in for her interview in favor of a stark dark maroon gown, designed to emphasize the long lines of her arms and her status as a killer. The President places that crown on Nancy’s head and she just looks him straight in the eye, unflinching, just as Enobaria did after her Games. She earned her place here. She knew what it would take to win and she did it.

No matter what happens next, no matter what her body is subjected to, she won this. She survived the Games and years of training before that, crawled past her kill tests and her Arena simulations to the crown on this side. She’s alive and so is her family and she knows that she’s never going to escape the Capitol’s reach but this- this victory is hers.

-

They tell her to pick a talent, and Nancy’s first instinct is to say _shooting_ , but she knows that there’s absolutely no way that the Capitol is going to give her a gun. They want her to be pretty and delightful and calm, something that can be paraded about on her Victory Tour without a reminder of the murderer that sits behind her eyes.

“Piano playing,” Enobaria suggests, baring her fanged teeth, “That’ll be good for fingers as skilled as yours.”

Nancy glances down at the fingers that killed seven kids and she just nods.

Enobaria catches the way Nancy’s eyes flick downward and her eyes narrow. “You survived,” she says, as she’s said since Nancy won the Games. For three months, now, since they left the Capitol, Enobaria has been helping Nancy recover as best she can, a process which mostly consists of reassuring Nancy of the fact that she earned the title of Victor. She doesn’t do it in a way like Brutus does, talking about honor and duty, or like Nero does, carefully patching up his tributes, or even like Lyme, in an almost parental way, but instead keeps reminding Nancy of the fact that she _survived_ , that she was desperate and clever enough to make it out.

(Nancy definitely likes the fact that Enobaria sees her, that Enobaria can read her so well, that her Mentor knows what to say and how to say it and never tries to baby her or fool her.)

“I survived,” Nancy repeats, exchanging a knowing glance with Enobaria, and her Mentor nods.

“Remember that.”

-

It takes three months of living in the Victor’s Village in Two for Enobaria to come up to her and say, “President Brenner’s going to summon you soon.”

“For what?” Nancy says, though she already knows. Every student who goes through the Centre knows what happens to tributes that are too pretty and too clever for their own good.

Enobaria looks at her for a long, long second, longer than any second in Nancy’s life save the ones she spent in front of the Cornucopia waiting for the timer to count down, and says, “You’re a pretty girl,” just like Nancy’s prep team said before they sent her out to watch herself slaughter children on a screen and smile about it. 

No more really needs to be said. Nancy knows her duty to District Two and their tributes and to her own family. Two isn’t supposed to get this punishment, isn’t supposed to be used this way, but she knows that she was too clever, and too conveniently pretty, and that this is her punishment. She won in a way that used the Arena to her advantage, got out of having to kill her fellow Careers up close and personal. She knows what will happen if she refuses to do as President Brenner says.

“Alright,” Nancy says, and Enobaria gives her a small smile, one that bares her predator’s teeth, one that almost seems proud. Enobaria is not a woman of flowery words, not a woman who smiles unless to intimidate someone. She’s not soft in any sort of way, preferring sharp knocks to hugs and scowls to smiles. So this small smile for Nancy, this small gesture of pride- Nancy is well aware of what it means.

(In the coming weeks and months, as Nancy goes to bed with Capitolites who want to fuck her and want to be fucked by her, ones who want her to use a knife or some other strange tool, she just lets her brain slide blank and focus on Mike and Holly and even their mother- the woman who handed Nancy over to the Centre- all of whom she is protecting with her actions. 

Things don’t taste quite as bitter, then.)

-

On Nancy’s Victory Tour, they call her the pretty little Victor, downplay her talent with knives in favor of her looks, treat her like a girl from One rather than a girl from Two. They talk about her like she’s just a girl, not a mountain, unlike other Twos.

They forget her desperation, how she nearly starved to death in the final days of the Arena before she slit the Nine-Girl’s throat, how she set mutts on her entire pack before leaving without a backwards glance. They forget about how she has seven kills to her name (eleven if you count the pack, the boy and girl from One, her fellow tribute from Two, and the girl from Four), how she’s a killer just as nasty as the rest of the Victors.

For a moment, she nearly does, too, thinking of how horrible it had been to kill innocent kids, far less culpable than her, twelve and thirteen-year-olds whose biggest crime had been having their names Reaped.

But then she thinks about Holly and Mike and their mother, about how Nancy’s prettiness and violence is keeping them well-fed and healthy and away from the Centre, about the Capitolites she’s having to fuck, and she swallows down protest and guilt.

She earned her place onto this stage, and it may have been through ugly, brutal means, but she still did it.

-

Sometimes Nancy collapses back onto her bed in her Capitol apartment and stares at her slender fingers as she waves them over her head.

District Two usually pushes out hulking tributes with gleams in their eyes. Nancy's not like that. She's almost too delicate-looking to be considered a usual Two Victor, with her slender fingers and tiny waist and neck. She hears more people draw comparisons between her and birds than her and mountains.

Then again, there’s a lot that sets her apart from usual Two Victors. The way she won her Games, by betraying the pack like that, to where she’s living now to what the Capitol’s really making her do as her talent. Most District Two Victors live in Two, but most District Two Victors aren’t Capitol whores, so Nancy living in her Capitol apartment doesn’t feel too strange to her.

At night she sometimes dreams of the Victor’s Village back in Two, of the promises of a community that the Centre had given her as a child, of the promise, unspoken, by Enobaria to help her stay sane after the Games, and she wishes that she hadn’t been pretty. She wishes that she hadn’t been clever. She wishes that there had been an honorable way to escape the Games, a way that hadn’t turned her into a whore, a way that would have ended with her in a house by Enobaria’s, rather than an apartment alone in the Capitol.

When Nancy wakes up, she knows that there was no other way for her to win, for her to be alive and sending some of her Victor’s winnings to her family, and she bites her lip and she tries not to think to much of the _could-have-beens._

-

Nancy isn’t even a Mentor for the the first Games after her own (District 2 has plenty, and thus Victor has to become a Mentor immediately), but she finds herself paying attention anyway due to the actions of an outlier from District 6, a District she doesn’t think she’s ever paid a lick of attention to in her life.

This outlier is a _volunteer_ , which seems practically impossible. After all, every kid who goes through the District Two Centre learns the basic facts about the Reapings and the Games, and one of the number one rules is that outliers _just don’t_ volunteer.

But the name Will Byers gets Reaped in Six and a boy with shaggy hair and a craggy face- a boy no one would ever look twice at, not with his average looks and bowed shoulders- shoots up to volunteer, shouting his desperate cry to the Escort Reaping the names. He practically marches up to the stage, patting a tiny boy’s shoulders as he moves through the crowd, and announces his name as “Jonathan Byers, Seventeen-Years-Old” with a scowl on his lips.

This by itself would be pretty crazy, but nothing is more insane than when Nancy finds herself watching his Games and finds him actually _copying her techniques_ , right down to the slitting of his palm to distract the mutts in his Arena (which looks far more like the ruins of an underground train system than her ruined city did).

This could get a tribute killed by the Gamemakers in any normal year, any year where they’re just an outlier trying to make it by, but Jonathan Byers has got two things on his side. One, that five days in he actually sets a mutt on fire using an elaborate trap, something that Nancy never came close to doing, and two, that he’s got a story to get him through, the one about his brother. Jonathan isn’t just an outlier- he’s an underdog with a clear stake, a vested interest in staying alive that the whole country has paid witness to. A Career might be able to stand against that kind of narrative in a normal year, but after a decade of nearly entirely Career wins (the only outlier win since the 62nd was Jessi Malone, the girl from Nine, in the 68th), the Gamemakers are all too willing to give the Games the shot in the arm they need with a “refreshing” storyline.

True to Nancy’s analysis, Jonathan Byers wins the Games three weeks after they’ve began with a stump in place of a hand after his bandaging job was just a little sloppier than hers and the mutts got ahold of his hand before he slit the throat of the last tribute. There is blood weeping out of the tourniquet that is only keeping him alive long enough for the announcement of his Victory before the hovercraft descends.

She watches that shaggy-haired boy with night vision goggles he stole from the Careers and his bloody stump and an axe in his hand that he took before the girl from Seven could, and she knows that she’s going to be interviewed in the next few days, and that she’s going to be asked about the boy from Six and just how closely he watched her Games.

-

For Jonathan’s Victory Interview, he walks out onstage to find himself greeted by his brother, who the Capitol brought in just for this touching reunion onstage. They hug and Will cries and Jonathan can’t stop smiling at his little brother, even when they replay his Games, because he did what he set out to do when he volunteered at the Reaping.

Despite the fact that Nancy knows that this is just part of a story the Capitol is selling to itself, her heart squeezes a bit from her seat in the front row of the audience. Will and Jonathan remind her of her and Mike, years ago, when she was still able to visit home instead of just sending most of her winnings to her family.

After his Victory interview, at the President’s Banquet, Nancy catches Jonathan Byers at a refreshments table. He’s cleaned up well, and though there’s nothing that a stylist can do to change his less-than-perfect features- definitely not after they’ve become so memorable, after all- the cut of his suit emphasizes his assets and the color brings out the grey of his eyes.

“I noticed how you won,” she says, “Good job with those mutts.” She’s from Two- she knows tact. She knows how to say things without saying them.

Jonathan, an outlier who never should have had a fucking chance except the Capitol loves a story and he’s actually far cleverer than anyone would have thought, smiles and says, “I learned it from you.”

Well, that’s one hell of an opening line, Nancy has to admit, and she allows herself to grin and say, “Glad it got you through, then.”

Jonathan looks over at his brother, who is busy being herded around by Javerne, one of District Six’s only three Victors outside of Jonathan, and he nods. “Glad it got me through, too.”

-

Nancy finds herself making out with Jonathan on his Victory Tour when he stops in District Two. There's a banquet, as there always is for Victors, and then afterwards there's a dance. She finds herself dancing with him, starting out talking about how he won his game but eventually leading into conversations about their little brothers, who it turns out are about the same age. Soon enough they're in a back hallway making out, and for the first time since she won her games, there's a big, genuine smile on Nancy's face because this is actually _fun._ This isn’t like being a whore- this is something she actually enjoys, with a partner who listens to her wants and needs, who is gentle and caring and she doesn’t think she’s ever seen anything more beautiful than Jonathan Byers.

The Capitol, on the other hand, call Jonathan _ugly_ , call him _broken_ because of his missing hand, and all Nancy can think is _you’re safe. You’re safe, thank everything that exists. They won’t take this part of you_. (Nancy gets to keep this part of Jonathan to herself, even if he doesn’t get to do the same with her.)

Instead, the Capitol takes what they _do_ consider beautiful: Jonathan’s photos. He chose photography as his talent to show off on his Tour, and it’s a perfectly mundane talent that will allow him to escape the Capitol reconsider their apathy for him beyond his relationship with Will.

So Jonathan’s photos go to the Capitolites and Jonathan goes to Nancy in her apartment, where for the first time in her life she has sex and it isn’t forced or painful but instead enjoyable and exciting and fun. Jonathan kisses down her face and neck and chest, constantly checking to make sure if everything he’s doing is okay, and Nancy thinks she’s never going to stop smiling.

After that, Jonathan has to go home at the beginning of every month, to see his mom and his little brother (who has somehow become a fascination of the Capitol after the whole Games thing), but he always ends up coming back to her apartment halfway through the month and spending the rest of the month with her. For the first time since she moved to the Capitol, Nancy’s apartment isn’t lonely or empty, and she can’t help but smile whenever the train rolls in on the 15th.

All in all, things are getting better. Life is less lonely. There are definitely less nights spent staring at ceilings and Nancy doesn’t feel quite so empty, anymore.

-

As the Seventy First Hunger Games dawns, Nancy takes note of a few tributes of interest. District Two’s own tributes, as always, a hard-eyed girl named Patria and a raven-haired boy named Gabriel who reminds her a bit too closely of a more mature Mike. The mad girl from Four, who is already a bit crazy before the Games even begin.

And then the seventeen-year-old boy from Seven, with a charming smile, soft-swept hair, and an eight in training that not even the paltry paper-product outfits the District 7 tributes get put into can distract from. If he can make it past the Bloodbath, then he might actually have the slightest of chances to be the Victor.

Of course, his biggest problem (and his strength, for better or worse) _is_ he’s a pretty boy. A pretty thing. And Nancy knows what happens to pretty tributes who becomes pretty Victors- it happened to her, after all.

The Capitol is going to eat the boy from Seven up, if they can get the leverage to make him lie beneath them.

(And they will- they always do.)

-

The Games open and it’s a wooded forest. Nothing that strange, not as far as she can tell from her spot watching the Games from her sofa, and the Bloodbath proceeds as usual, with a lot of the outliers (including both of Jonathan’s kids) getting wiped out.

Jonathan shows up at her apartment that night, face blank, and she just makes him some tea and sits down on the sofa with him, where she holds him through the night as they watch the Games. This year’s games quickly take an interesting turn on the second morning when the tributes start to turn up dead in the trees. Trees which Nancy soon realizes are covered in giant thorns that can grow and retract within minutes, piercing through skin and muscle and bone to skewer the life from tributes. 

Then the pretty boy from Seven- who she very quickly learns is named Steve Harrington- fashions himself a club made out of that thorny wood, wrapping the base with the fabric of his jacket to protect his hands, and starts taking out his fellow tributes. He twirls his bat as if he knows it will net him sponsors, and fuck, it does, with silver parachutes practically raining down around him. (Nancy can practically feel Blight's sheer joy at being able to give his tribute all of this.)

Unlike Nancy, who was precise with her kills and only had bloody ones under her name due to the mutts, or Jonathan, who followed her example, Steve’s kills are bloody. They’re gory.

(And they’re keeping him alive.)

After two weeks, the final cannon booms on the mad girl from Four and Steve Harrington is left standing there, the side of his face carved open by the girl from One the day before, blood smeared on his jaw, as he is declared Victor of the Seventy First Hunger Games.

And Nancy knows, heart heavy, that it’s only a matter of time before the Capitol devours that pretty boy.

-

Steve’s interview only makes him prettier, spreading that “charmer” image even further across the Capitol. His suit is cut close to the body, emphasizing his muscles, and of course Remake got rid of all of those facial scars in favor of clean skin surrounding those lovely eyes.

Nancy has to swallow back the bile at the knowledge that before she meets him in Two for his Victory Tour, this boy in the blue suit, with the wide but somewhat innocent smile, is going to spreading his legs for the Capitol, just like her.

-

Steve only goes back to District Seven for a couple of weeks before he’s back at the Capitol. He stays the first few nights of his stay in the guest bedroom of Nancy’s apartment- she’d offered it up to him to stay in whenever he’d needed it at the banquet after his Victory Interview- and Nancy waits for the other shoe to drop.

In the meantime, though, she gets to know him a little better, over meals and events. He has a nice laugh, an easy laugh, one that only freezes occasionally as he remembers how he ended up here, in the Capitol. He doesn’t talk much about his parents, but he adores his cousin Robin, who’s just about a year older than Mike. He can talk for hours (and does) about how Robin and his Aunt run the bakery back home in Seven. He loves the Capitol romance movies, though he hates the talk shows.

Over these few days, she gets to know him as more than just the pretty boy from Seven who bashed open the heads of children until he was the last one standing. She gets to know him as Steve, who loves ice cream and laughs like his soul isn’t aching and smiles at her with a smile unaltered by Capitol surgeons-

Which only means that it hurts more when he gets the comm from the President telling him that his first appointment is tomorrow night.

“What the fuck?” Nancy hears Steve shout from the kitchen, and she and Jonathan get up from the sofa in the living room to head in and figure out what’s happening.

“The President says to be ready for my appointment for tomorrow night,” Steve says, glancing between the two former Victors uncertainly. “What- what does that mean? What’s the appointment for?”

Nancy purses her lips and glances at Jonathan. How to explain what Steve’s about to go through? How to cushion the blow? How to tell him that the second Arena never ends, that becoming a Victor didn’t mean a win, just meant survival, and that this is how he’s going to have to survive for the rest of his life?

“He’s going to want you to have sex with them,” she eventually says, because that’s the truth, that’s what Steve’s going to have to know before he goes to that appointment tomorrow.

And in return for her information, Steve’s eyes are blown wide open with panic. Gone is the boy who killed six children with a thorned bat- instead there is just a scared seventeen-year-old who’s in over his head with no way out.

(Nancy has to wonder if she looked like that when she was told what she would have to do in the Capitol, or if she had just knuckled down, hid the fear behind her eyes, and just gotten it over with. That’s what she thinks she did, but she can never be sure what showed on the outside.)

“It’s better if you just don’t think about it,” Nancy says to him, trying to be comforting. Trying to give him some sort of advice to help him get through this more easily.

But it doesn’t work. That panic doesn’t disappear, that fear doesn’t melt away. Instead, Steve just stutters out: “I’ve never been with anyone before.” For a moment Nancy’s actually somewhat confused. Steve is a rather good-looking man- alright, more than _rather_ , he’s beautiful-

“Okay, well, I’ve done some handjobs and shit before,” he admits, modifying his claim, and well, that makes sense. “But not, you know, actually slept with anyone. And I-” His voice stutters out as he looks down at the comm requesting him for his appointment tomorrow. There’s something a little lost and afraid in his expression, something that almost makes her forget that just a month ago he killed six children in cold blood.

Nancy looks at Jonathan, remembers his comments during the Victor’s Banquet about Steve’s attractiveness. Remembers how Jonathan’s voice had gone soft when she’d mentioned Steve staying here. Remembers Steve standing at his Victor’s Interview, something broken in his expression as he watched himself kill all of those kids. Remembers herself on her first appointment, trying to resist the urge to crawl into a closet and never leave again for the rest of her life.

And she makes an executive decision. (She’s good at that, making the hard choices, being too smart and too clever for her own sanity.)

“If you want, you could be with us first,” she says, “Tonight, before your appointment tomorrow.”

Steve’s eyes are blown wide, still, but now it’s for a completely different reason. He waves his hands in front of him, almost in a defensive way. “Whoa,” he says, “I don’t want you guys to feel forced-”

Nancy and Jonathan exchange a glance, something flickering in their gazes. “No,” Jonathan turns and says to Steve, voice quiet but matter-of-fact, “We want to.”

Steve’s gaze goes soft, something in his expression slackening, and he takes a deep breath. “Alright,” he says, “I want to be with you, too.”

This isn’t ideal, Nancy knows as she leans forward and presses her lips to Steve's, trying to be both gentle and passionate, trying to communicate how she feels about him in this instant. This is most definitely not the most ideal set of circumstances under which to first sleep with somebody, but as a Victor, there are very few ideal circumstances to do anything, so she's got to make the most of what she has.

This isn't like the first time she slept with Jonathan. This isn't a celebration of sorts at the tail end of a Victory Tour, full of giggling and laughter and teasing. This is an event with a very strict deadline, the shadow of tomorrow's events hanging over top of everything that's happening.

And yet, there is something special about tonight, and Nancy is intent on enjoying herself, as well as making sure that Steve and Jonathan enjoy themselves as well.

The clothes peel off as they all head to the bedroom- to her bedroom, to her and Jonathan’s, to her and Jonathan and Steve’s. To a bed that has always felt too big for her by herself, that felt pretty nice with Jonathan, that fits perfectly with all three of them.

Steve’s hands are gentle when they touch her. They’re not the hands of a killer, or even of a lumberjack- they’re the hands of someone scraped clean by the Capitol, someone who still has someone at home, someone who hasn’t yet been forced to fuck Capitolites. He’s unsure but is obviously trying his best to do everything right, being as soft and gentle as possible.

(By Snow, she hopes that he stays gentle, that the Capitol doesn’t turn him into the monster they think he is. She wants to keep him as he is, just like Jonathan has stayed the way he is, two gentle boys who are killers but managed to maintain some of their humanity along the way.)

Jonathan, in turn, is as eager to bring her pleasure, but this time he’s also making sure to take care of Steve. She’s so thankful for him, helping ground her as she helps ground him, keeping her or Steve from dwelling too much on tomorrow’s fate, instead just having fun in the moment.

-

When they're all done, and they collapse back into back into bed, Nancy finds herself watching the two boys in her bed.

There's something almost tender about the way that Jonathan pushes Steve's hair back, the way in which Steve's hand finds its way into Nancy's, entwining their fingers together. There's something that connects the three of them together now, not just their nature as killers and monsters, but also something almost sweet and loving. For a moment, only a moment, Nancy can almost forget the reasons why they're here together tonight, the things that Steve is going to have to do tomorrow, the things that she is going to have to do weeks down the road.

Right now, she can just lay in bed and imagine that they aren’t Victors, that she isn’t a whore and that Steve won’t become one tomorrow, that they are just lovers that fell together by pure affection and not by unfortunate circumstance.

-

After Steve leaves the next morning, something like fear in his eyes (but less than last night, not so much natural panic, because they’re going to take something from him tonight but it won’t be as much), Jonathan turns to Nancy at their kitchen table.

“Please tell me we’re keeping him,” Jonathan says, something fond in his eyes, and Nancy’s sure that something similar is reflected in hers. The boy from Seven has made a small place in her heart with his easy laughter and impish grin and his protective words about his cousin, and last night cemented him even further into her brain, the memories of his smile and voice joined by the memories of his lips against her skin.

Nancy knows the value of choice, though, of the fact that what happened last night was not entirely their free will and their affection, but also part desperation. They’re still in Arena, still making choices that are the _less-worse_ options rather than the _I-want_ options. 

“If he lets us,” Nancy says, choking back the words _and I hope he does._

-

Steve comes back to Nancy’s apartment early the next morning, and there’s something off with his gait, just a bit. Nancy hates it because she knows what happened to him, knows it because it happened to her, though not as quickly as it did to him, and she just hopes that what they did two nights ago cushioned the blow of what happened to him last night.

But despite that bit of a limp, despite the knowledge of what he went through, Steve’s face is alive, his gaze electric. He’s a bit out of breath, his gaze a bit shifty, but he barrels forward with his proposition. Nancy likes that about him, she’s gotta admit- that single-minded determination, especially when it’s focused on her. “I don’t want what happened between us to just be a one time thing,” he says, “If you guys are okay with that.”

“Of course we are,” Jonathan says with a smile, and pulls Steve into a kiss. Steve flinches, but only just (and it’s understandable, after what he just did last night for the first time, after what he just sold himself into), and then smiles into Jonathan’s lips. 

Nancy breathes a small sigh of relief. Maybe two nights ago wasn’t a fluke. Maybe they can make this work, this relationship between three broken killers. Maybe they can work through the nights Steve is called away, just like the nights Nancy is called away, make something functioning between the three of them that will stretch over half-months away and careers as whores and the blood staining their nightmares.

Then Steve turns to her, that wide, brilliant smile on his lips, and he steps forward. She meets his lips with hers, and as his hands- those hands that are far gentler than any killer’s should be- reach for her waist, she lets herself believe in the possibility of this lasting.

-

As time goes forward, Nancy becomes used to a routine, of sorts. Jonathan spends half of his time in the Capitol and half in District Six, alternating two-week cycles living in their apartment and living with his mother and brother in the District. Despite the fact that he just won only the Games before last, Capitol tends to forget about him most of the time, allowing him to mostly do what he wants when the Games aren’t happening.

(Jonathan and Steve are both outlier Victors. That status lets Jonathan be forgotten. Steve, not so much.)

Nancy and Steve, on the other hand, live nearly all of the time in the Capitol, in Nancy’s apartment.

Some nights, Steve’s side of the bed is empty, and Nancy knows what President Brenner is making him do. So she sets an alarm to get up early and makes sure to have coffee, a shower, and a blanket ready for when he gets home, because she can’t stop this from happening but she can sure as hell make it better in the aftermath.

And in turn, he does the same for her on the nights where she has to grit her teeth and go out, because the Capitol doesn’t value piano playing half as much as they value her spreading her legs for them. He is awake when she gets home, and he’ll comb her hair and give her scalp massages and watch stupid Capitol TV shows about stupid Capitol romances with her. They’ll laugh together about the stupid Capitolites with their green-dyed skin and bejeweled eyelids and he’ll press a kiss onto a forehead or she’ll kiss his lips and everything will feel as normal as it can, in their situation.

(Through all of this, she never asks him who he’s protecting when he leaves, and he never does the same to her. There are some things that don’t have to be acknowledged, and their side-jobs as whores is a subject that is rarely talked about.)

Then Jonathan shows up for his visit and he’s there for both her and Steve, cooking his mother’s favorite soup recipes that she learned from her own mother, and then she’ll kiss Jonathan as he stirs the pot. He’ll take photos of her and Steve around the apartment, capturing what he calls their “good angles.” Steve will chase Jonathan around the living room and kitchen until he reaches Jonathan and tackles him with tickles. 

On quiet nights, she’ll sometimes find herself and Steve braiding each others’ hair, gentle in a way that the prep teams never are, with Jonathan occasionally joining in and helping them. It’s domestic in a way she can’t remember ever being before. She was put in the Centre full-time at age ten, and spent the vast majority of her afternoons after age six there as well. She can’t really remember her family ever being as close as this.

But now, she has Steve and Jonathan, with their gentle reassurances and wide smiles and their proof that even killers can be kind, which is everything she needs right now. Through all of this, Nancy’s heart will grow and grow until it feels fit to burst. She knows this can’t last, that this fragile relationship can be blown up at any moment by the Capitol, but she just sinks into it for now, letting her be as happy as she can be.

-

Steve’s Victory Tour hits and he says goodbye, kissing her cheek and Jonathan’s forehead, and something aches in her chest to see him go, despite the fact that she knows she’s going to see him again in just a few days for his visit to District Two (one of the few times a year the President actually _wants_ Nancy to be in her own District, rather than at his disposal for press shit in the Capitol). 

For the first few Districts- 12 through 8- she and Jonathan watch from their sofa in the Capitol. Then Jonathan leaves as Steve makes his way up to Six, where Jonathan will be one of the four Victors there to greet him, and Nancy is left alone in her apartment for the first time since Steve first moved in, that second month after his win.

It’s almost strange, she realizes, having the apartment empty again. The apartment hasn’t been empty since Steve moved in, five months ago, and even before that she’s had Jonathan at least half of the time since his Victory Tour. Now, she’s alone again.

Before Steve and Jonathan, it was just her, alone in the Capitol, the lone Two whore. One and Four have plenty, as do a few of the prettier outliers, but for a year it was just her in this apartment, alone against the Capitol, the pretty killer in the pretty Capitol apartment just waiting for the Capitolites to call her in for work.

She takes a deep breath as she falls back into her bed. This is going to be a long few weeks.

(Not for the first time, she wishes that she lived in a Village like the rest of Two’s Victors, that she would never be lonely because she would always have a secondary family to live around her, that she would never feel alone in a city of thousands of souls.)

-

When Nancy sees Steve in District Two, and it’s just like Jonathan’s Victory Tour all over again, with her laughing and dancing and kissing her boyfriend in a back hallway when no one is watching.

(Or, at least, that’s what she does after Steve bites his lip through the speech to Two, where she can see all-too-familiar ghosts haunting his eyes.)

At the lunch with Two’s Victors, Nancy tells Steve not to feel guilty about killing the Two-Boy this year, who was stupid enough to not keep his guard up. After all, only one person can make it out of the Arena every year, and if Steve hadn’t killed Two’s boy then he would have died in the Games. (And if it’s up to Nancy, she’s so, so glad that Steve put his bat between Two’s boy’s eyes.)

When Nancy sees him off from the Station, she knows that she’ll see him again in just a couple of days in the Capitol, when Jonathan and her will be there for the President’s Ball. After that he’ll have to circle back to Seven for his final farewell, but then he’ll be back in her and Jonathan’s arms.

-

Steve gets home days later, after his speech back in Seven, and there are dark circles under his eyes and a slight slur in his voice from the pills they often give Victors to get through the Tour, but he smiles when he sees them so that’s good.

That night they all collapse into bed together, Steve in the middle with Jonathan sprawled on one side and Nancy tucked in on the other, and she stays awake even after she hears their breathing level out into sleep.

They are all killers. They all have the deaths of children under their belts. In a few hours, one of them will wake up from nightmares of a thorned bat or a knife sinking into the flesh of children, of the spray of blood and bone against their skin.

Nancy knows that she deals with it a lot better than Steve or Jonathan do, that the Centre prepared her better for the feeling of killing children. Sure, her kill tests were against criminals or criminals and not kids, that her arena simulations were with dull weapons against her other students in the Centre, but she still had _some_ sort of experience before the Arena. Steve and Jonathan didn’t.

She still dreams in blood, just like they do, but she didn’t need those pills on her tour. She didn’t tremble and shake so bad that they had to drug her so that way she could make those speeches. Nancy and Enobaria had ridden that train together, and Enobaria hadn’t so much as held her hand. Nancy had repeated those speeches with a flat tone, focused on mental images of birds and mountains rather than the faces of dead tributes, and she’d been able to ground herself against any sort of anxiety-induced meltdown.

What does that say about Nancy? What does that make her? Does that make her more capable, or more cold-hearted? Does that make her better, or far, far worse?

-

The very first year she steps forward to Mentor is the very first year that Steve does as well, though Steve has much less of a choice than she did due to District Seven’s lack of Victors.

This year, District Two sends in Daphne, Nancy’s pick, a quarry girl with determination in her eyes and a killer’s instinct with a knife, and Billy, Lyme’s pick, a boy with a sadistic glint in his eyes and quite the hand with a mace.

Nancy finds herself in the Mentor seats in the same room as Jonathan, who already did this once last year, and Steve, who has the desperation that Two warns about in first year Mentors. He’s got some sort of hope in his Tributes- or, at least, the girl, who has a violent sort of gleam in her eyes that can’t be underestimated- that Nancy isn’t foolish enough to indulge in. She’s already mentally preparing for Daphne, Steve’s kids, and Jonathan’s kids to go down, because she’s going to guide her girl as far as possible but she’s not stupid enough to go in believing in miracles.

So the platforms rise into the Arena and Nancy _knows_ that it’s the Careers’ years year to fail. The Cornucopia is piled high with maces and other bludgeoning weapons, and she doesn’t think she can see a single food item or survival pack in the midst. This year’s Games will be bloody and violent and brutal, and if Daphne’s the one out then Nancy is going to have a serious task on her hands of piecing her girl back together.

Then the bloodbath starts, and Jonathan’s kids and Steve’s boy die, and Nancy’s girl is in the pack and Steve’s girl is hiding, which is definitely a way to survive, but this year isn’t boding well for anyone who can’t swing a mace. (And Steve’s girl may be harboring a secret violent urge, but she’s a stick-thin fifteen-year-old daughter of a merchant who, unlike Steve, has never entered a lumber forest in her life.)

So Nancy watches as Jonathan leaves the Mentor room and heads back to their apartment, leaving her and Steve at their stations. Her eyes are trained on Daphne, laughing on Nancy’s screen, but occasionally she’ll glance up at Steve, whose gaze can’t be pried away from his screen. Next to him sits Blight (as the other Victor from Seven, Cass Miller, is over seventy-years-old and half-blind from a stroke) who’s giving Steve the occasional bit of advice as Blight’s boy is dead.

Nancy brings her gaze back to her own screen and wishes, distantly, that she had Enobaria by her side to show her how to do this. Lyme is nice and all, but she’s not her Mentor like Blight was Steve’s. (Then again, Nancy knows that Enobaria doesn’t like being a Mentor, that she only entered the Mentoring room the one time for Nancy herself, and that she probably didn’t want to enter the Mentoring room again just to Mentor Billy, who probably wasn’t a very good fit for Enobaria for some reason or another.)

Well, let’s hope the odds are ever in Daphne’s favor.

-

Steve has the worst time failing out of the three of them. The Centre in Two teaches its students how to deal with the realities of the Games, prime them with the exact statistics and likelihoods of getting your tributes out, while Jonathan only really cares about the fact that his brother has survived another Reaping. Jonathan’s accepted the fact that District Six isn’t likely to produce another Victor any time soon, if ever.

The night his girl dies at the hands of the One-Girl, a week and a half into the Games, Steve rages. “We’re killers!” he shouts, treasonous words pouring from his lips, “We’re monsters! We just let them die! We could have saved them-”

And Nancy hates it, she really does- Daphne died a couple of days ago when the pack split and her head was brained in by the girl from Four- but she slides her lips over his to try and silence some of those words that could bring down punishment on Steve’s cousin and their families or could even lose Nancy Steve or Jonathan.

“You can’t say that,” she whispers, and his screams turn to sobs. He’s a killer, she’s a killer, but he breaks down in her arms and Jonathan runs his fingers through Steve’s hair. Nancy can see the way that Jonathan’s lips are set, the way he hates having to watch Steve break like this.

Jonathan kisses Steve’s forehead. “We’re monsters, too,” he says, tone apologetic, “But we can’t save them all. There’s nothing we can do but put the effort in.”

(That’s the nature of the Games- even if one of the three of them brought home a Victor, the other two would leave with nothing. Whatever happens, kids die. They might not be hers, they might be hers, but even in the best of circumstances two of them will come home with nightmares and failure staining their minds.)

“This is never going to end, is it?” Steve asks hoarsely, fingers tightening on the fabric of Nancy’s pj shirt, and she shakes her head. No use sugarcoating things to a man who just watched his first set of kids die in the Arena.

“We just have to learn to live with it,” she says, because just like the fucking, the deaths will follow them until the day they die.

Steve shudders into Nancy’s shirt, and Jonathan looks to her above his head. His lips are pursed and there are no tears on his face, and he understands how she feels when she tries to comfort Steve. He knows about _learning to live with_ the life they have, with curling up on this sofa and having to accept the odds that they have been given.

Nancy and Jonathan both know that Steve is going to have to learn to live with that the same way. And they’re going to help him do so. They’re not going to make the man they care about go through this alone, not when they know what’s happening and can help him along the way.

-

The Games are still going when Enobaria drops by a few days later. Billy, the girl from One, the pair from Four, the girl from Nine, and the boy from Ten are still in, but it’s been a week since Daphne died.

Nancy is still the first and only tribute Enobaria’s Mentored, and though they are nothing alike in kill method or even in personality (thus leaving Nancy to wonder why Enobaria even agreed to Mentor her), they are linked by this small fact. There will always be some sort of relationship between her and Enobaria, even if Nancy so rarely gets to see her Mentor nowadays.

“So,” Enobaria says, “You had your first tribute.”

Daphne’s face, determined and hard before the Games, then slashed up by the Girl from One during the Games, flashes through Nancy’s mind. She failed to bring home her first tribute, which is to be expected, but still is disappointing. This was a girl who trusted Nancy to bring her home, who spent seven years in the Centre before dying with her head smashed in by a mace. She failed, just as was expected, but she failed hard.

(Does it say something about Nancy that she feels more regret, more grief, over this death than by the ones she caused in her own Games? That she is more likely to break down crying over her tribute than over her own kills?)

But Nancy just nods, not showing a glimpse of disappointment that her tribute died. She hasn’t spent much time with Two Victors at all, save during Victory Tours and the Games, but she knows that Two Victors don’t show weakness. They accept what has happened and they accept that next year will bring the chance to bring home another tribute, another Victor.

Enobaria’s expression doesn’t change, doesn’t show any sympathy, but Nancy wasn’t expecting it to. “How are you holding up?” she asks, though, because they may have a very distant relationship, but there’s some things that every Mentor and their Victor share in Two.

“Just fine,” Nancy says, glancing over at the sofa, where Jonathan and Steve are sitting there, watching her and Enobaria like they’re observing a cat and an insect she’s somehow managed to befriend.

Enobaria looks over at Nancy’s boys and fixes them with her predator’s grin. To their credit, neither of her boys flinch, though Jonathan’s eyes narrow just a bit and Steve’s fingers clench the fabric of his pants. Still, though- they might be Victors, but they’re not District Two. They’re not even Careers.

Nancy knows that she’s not a typical Two Victor, not by a long shot, that Enobaria would have preferred if Nancy had just won her Games honorably and would have been able to move right into Two’s Victor Village after the Games finished rather than live her life as a Capitol whore. Falling into a relationship with two outlier Victors has only widened that divide considerably, turning Nancy into a Victor that isn’t quite Two, isn’t quite outlier, is nothing but a strange creature that doesn’t really fit anywhere, even in the Capitol.

“Seems like it,” Enobaria says, eventually looking back to Nancy rather than continuing to stare unnervingly at Steve and Jonathan.

As Nancy watches Enobaria, a question bubbles up in her mind, a question that she can’t answer very well, a question that she’s pushed down for ages but that recently came back after becoming a Mentor on her own.

“Why did you choose me?” Nancy asks, thinking of Daphne, who she’d selected from the stack of files she’d picked up at the tail end of her trip to Two during Steve’s Victory Tour, who she’d fought for the right to Mentor because Daphne had the highest marks on knives but also on _critical thinking_. She thinks of the girl she’d just failed to bring home, the girl who made it to the Final Seven before being taken out by the girl from Four, who’d smashed Daphne in the back of the head and then let her bleed out and slowly die from internal bleeding and ruptured organs.

Enobaria, Games-crazy, dangerous Enobaria who ripped out a boy’s throat with her teeth and carries around two knives with her all the time, even when she sleeps, gives Nancy a smile that can’t be considered soft, not with the fangs that can slice open a throat, but could be considered proud. (Or maybe, in some strange universe, fond.) “Because you were the one that would do anything to get out of that Arena. Damn Career honor, damn nobility- you were going to make it out, no matter what you had to do. You would have figured out a way to crawl out of their on your bloody, battered knees, fuck everyone who tried to take it from you. I was going to mentor you because you’re as mad to survive as I am.”

Something solidifies in Nancy’s chest, something hard and unmovable as a mountain. She’s a Two Victor, and she may not be a typical one, but she is made of the same quarry stone as the rest of them. “I only hope to be half as mad as you,” Nancy says, and she means it.

Enobaria gives her a flat stare, though. “You’re still surviving, and it may not be like expected, but you’re pulling it off and making some sort of claim on your own life, no matter how stupid I might find said claim.” She glances over at Steve and Jonathan as she says that, and Nancy doesn’t agree with the ‘stupid’ comment- clearly- but she isn’t offended. She knows how Twos talk, what Enobaria’s trying to get at with this whole explanation. “That’s plenty mad enough.”

Nancy doesn’t say _thanks_ \- she doesn’t think that Enobaria would appreciate it. Instead, she says, “Stones and earth, Enobaria,” the traditional Two wish of luck.

“Stones and earth, Nancy,” Enobaria says in return, then turns and leaves, taking her flail-smile with her, and Nancy turns back to her boys.

“So,” she says, “What are we watching now?”

Jonathan blinks at her. “You’re such a bad-ass.”

Nancy blinks right back at him. “Enobaria’s my Mentor.” Which, for a Two, means that she’s basically family, and for most Two-Victors, means _more_ than family.

Steve and Jonathan don’t quite understand the system in Two, though. They’re both outliers, who entered the Games with no official training, nothing but desperation and their wits and enough of a survival instinct to morph them into killers. Their mentors were just that to them, full-stop. There were no unspoken promises, no strange divides, no connections forged before the Reaping and after the Games. Steve and Jonathan weren’t chosen by their mentors from a pool of the best and the brightest, weren’t fought over for the chance to Mentor- _she_ was.

“Alright,” Jonathan says after a few moments, “We’re watching that game show where the Capitolites try to guess literally any trivia about the Districts before tonight’s mandatory recap.”

“Not one of Steve’s romances?” Nancy asks, raising an eyebrow as she heads back to the sofa to join them. She slides into the spot on the left end of the couch, on Steve’s left side, leaving him in the middle. It’s been a few days since his tributes died, but Nancy and Jonathan feel better leaving him in the middle, where he can experience some of the physical comfort.

“Didn’t feel appropriate,” Steve says, voice light despite the dark gleam in his eyes.

Nancy can understand that sentiment pretty easily, as she can understand why mixing romance and the deaths of children in the Arena doesn’t feel quite right.

“Then let’s find out what the Capitolites know about home sweet home,” she says, a humorous lilt to her voice.

-

So this year District Two pulls off its first win since Nancy, but it isn’t her fierce, bloody, determined girl with eyes of mountain flint- it’s Billy, Lyme’s boy, the one with the dark eyes who doesn’t seem to give half a shit about the family he left behind. He wins by smashing in the head of the girl from Four with his mace after that girl took out Daphne at the Final Seven, and Nancy sits back on the sofa, staring at the Two boy bathed in blood and bits of bone.

Well, at least District Two brought home another Victor, right?

-

All in all, it's almost remarkably easy to get used to life in the Capitol. Nancy's never going to pretend that life is absolutely fantastic or that she wouldn't rather be living at home with her family than being a President Brenner's beck and call, but for the life of Victor, she could have it a lot worse. Sure, around the time of the Games, she has to sell her body at the behest of the Capitol, but for most of the year, life is pretty decent. She gets to live in an apartment with one of her boyfriends practically year-round, and the other boyfriend spends half the year at their apartment anyway.

-

Winter in the Capitol is far easier than winter in District 7, definitely, the most far north of the Districts, or District 6, the second farthest north, or even Nancy’s own Two, which is just a bit north of the Capitol, which basically means that while most Capitolites are shivering in their apartments, staying out of the cold, Nancy, Jonathan, and Steve are outside playing in the snow on the rooftop, making snowmen and having snowball fights and laughing their way through the winter time. This year is the first one in the past three that none of them will have to suffer through an entire Victory Tour, just dinner with some other Victor, and it feels rather relieving to have that weight off of their shoulders. They’re actually able to enjoy themselves and the too-pretty winter here in the Capitol.

For the Seventy Second Victory Tour, Nancy finds herself not having to leave the Capitol until after the President’s Ball. After all, she won’t have to go back to Two until Billy gives his Victor’s homecoming speech. Instead, she finds herself spending yet another set of winter days alone in the Capitol, waiting for her boys to return for the President’s Ball.

Unlike the first time, though, Nancy doesn’t ache as badly for their return as before. This time around she makes herself useful, practicing her piano playing (which, despite her having no natural talent for it, she’s getting better at by sheer practice and determination) and watching some of Steve’s favorite romances for probably the fifteenth time. She builds a snowman on the rooftop and practices her knife-aim on it. She even braves the clubs and goes to a local Capitol bar to watch the Victory Tour while eating something other than her own cooking (which was never that great anyway- Jonathan’s the cook and baker, not her).

All in all, the couple of weeks passes by rather quickly, and Nancy can’t help but be thankful for it.

-

For the Seventy Third Games, as Nancy has for every Games she hasn’t Mentored, Nancy watches Two’s Reapings with very little interest. Everyone knows that it will be two Centre kids going in this year, the ones who were picked out by the crop of Mentors, just as they are every year. (She knows that Mike is safe, just as he always is, that even if his name is by some insane possibility plucked that an Centre kid is set to volunteer for him. Mike’s not like Will Byers- he’s safe.)

Steve and Jonathan don’t have that luxury, instead actually being present in their Districts for the Reaping. Nancy watches as four kids are Reaped for the two of them, young kids with no meat on their bones and no training and no story to propel them through. One of Jonathan’s kids is already a Morphlant, the sallowness in the boy’s features and yellow-tinted clear that he’s already an addict, and Nancy knows that the boy will die in the Bloodbath, no chance of him making it any further than that. None of the other three have any chance to win, either, but they might make it a couple of days into the Games if they don’t charge right at the Cornucopia.

This time, Steve takes his tributes’ chances a bit better, returning home by the end of the second night after his boy is skewered by one of the Two-Girl’s spears. Jonathan’s already back, as both of his kids died in the bloodbath, and he has that same flat look in his eyes as he does every year he Mentors so Nancy really only has to focus on making sure Steve doesn’t do anything too stupid.

Nancy finds Steve downing a shot of some liquor from Nine and then skinny dipping in the pool on their apartment’s rooftop, which, depending on your perspective, might be classified as “too stupid,” but to her is far better than sobbing and screaming at the Capitol.

“You do know that the whole of the Capitol could see you right now, right?” she asks, sitting down on the edge of the pool with a glass of Eleven-wine in hand. She’s just in a pair of sleep shorts and a loose tank top, her hair falling down for the night. It’s nearly up to the length it was before the Arena, definitely long enough that she can keep it up in a ponytail during the day when she’s lounging around her room. (Tying it up in the simple style her prep team can’t control gives her some feeling of control in her every day life.) At night, though, when she’s close to sleep- it falls down loose and comfy around her shoulders.

Steve snorts. “There are no cameras up here, Nance,” he says, and though his voice is just a bit slurred by the alcohol he’s not screaming or crying so that’s an improvement on last year.

Then Nancy hears a clicking noise and looks up to find Jonathan lowering his camera, a fond smile on his face.

“Creeping on us, I see?” Nancy asks, raising an eyebrow, and Jonathan shrugs.

“I saw something beautiful, so I wanted to capture it,” Jonathan says.

“Well, I guess that makes at least _one_ camera up here,” Steve says, giving Jonathan a drunken wink, and Jonathan’s cheeks go just a little pink. To be completely honest, Nancy kind of loves the fact that she and Steve can still provoke that kind of reaction from Jonathan, even nearly two years into their relationship. “Good thing that this is one cameraman that I can actually get behind.” Somehow, Jonathan’s cheeks go even brighter red with the perceived innuendo, and Nancy and Steve exchange a fond look as Nancy downs the rest of her drink and slides all the way into the water, ignoring the fact that she’ll have to change her clothes before sleep.

In fact- it’s just the three of them here, now. Why not deal with the clothes now?

Nancy bends over a little and yanks off her shirt and shorts, leaving her in nothing whatsoever. Jonathan’s blush intensifies as she tosses the clothing onto the side of the pool (it’s been years since she left the Centre, but her aim is still impeccable as she manages to land her clothing not a couple of inches from her glass without knocking it over), but he lifts the camera again and snaps a picture of her laughing with Steve. When Nancy raises an eyebrow, Jonathan says, “This is just for our private collection, I promise.”

“Then you better join us in the water, lover boy,” Steve says, and Jonathan’s blush intensifies but he sets down the camera and complies, stripping down to his boxers and joining them under the water.

Despite the opening, Nancy doesn’t tease Jonathan about the fact that he’s not getting naked. Despite the fact that the three of them have had sex plenty of times, Jonathan’s less comfortable with showing so much of his body in public (and despite the fact that this isn’t technically public, it’s definitely their completely walled-in apartment either.)

Instead, she just splashes him, pulling both boys into a water war, and they forget about anything more violent than their own splashing for a few hours.

-

Over the next few days, the three of them watch the Games, watch as the Career Pack splinters after they hunt down the outliers until the Final Eight arrives and it’s the One-Girl, One-Boy, Two-Girl, Four-Boy, Four-Girl, Five-Boy, Eight-Girl, and Ten-Boy left. The One Tributes take out the Two-Girl as the pack splits (but Two was never going to win, not right after Billy’s win last year, so that wasn’t too much of a shock), and for a while the remaining Careers hunt along District lines, staying with their District partner. The Ones take out the Five-Boy, the Fours take out the Ten-Boy, and the nest day the Eight-Girl is devoured by a swarm of carnivorous spider-mutts, thus plunging them down into the Final Four, where the One-Girl and the Four-Boy win their fights against their respective District partners, sending the two of them into the final duel, where the girl from One takes home the crown this year, leaving both Nancy and Steve to wince at the win.

“What’s the matter with her winning-?” Jonathan asks, raising an eyebrow because the One-Girl had won by killing the Four-Boy as her final battle, and they couldn’t be wincing at tributes from their Districts dying.

“All the girls from One who win are like us,” Steve says, and he could mean anything, but Jonathan’s eyes narrow because they’ve been together long enough for him to figure out exactly what Steve means.

“Every single one?” he asks, some sort of hope coloring his voice.

Nancy wishes that she could smooth away the furrow in his brow, give truth to the hope in his voice, but she can’t. She grew up Career. She lives as a Victor-whore. She knows the facts. She hasn’t been very idealistic in a long time.

So instead, she nods. “It’s part of the training, there. Not like the Centre in Two.” Fat lot of good that did Nancy, though.

Jonathan swallows, a look of nausea passing over his features that Nancy doesn’t think he’s ever going to be desensitized to, not like her and Steve. And she’s pretty sure that she doesn’t _want_ him to ever be desensitized to it- it reminds her that this isn’t the norm, that there is still something wrong with what’s happening to her and Steve, even if they get used to their reality.

-

When the Capitol comes for the photos Jonathan took a few weeks ago and demands they get auctioned off, Jonathan's face goes paper white. "I'm so sorry,” he apologizes, over and over, voice drowning in regret.

“It's okay,” Nancy says, because when you're already used to selling your body, a nude photograph isn't going to shatter a sense of dignity that you no longer have.

Jonathan, the only one of them who hasn’t been forced to sell his body, looks at her with the most unbelieving look in his eyes, but though it hurts a little, it doesn’t hurt for the reasons he thinks it does. It more hurts that this was a moment of intimacy and love between the three of them that everyone is now getting to see than this is something that is somehow perverting her. It’s not so much about Nancy’s own personal body than it is about their relationship, about the one thing that Nancy got to claim as _hers_ and not the Capitol’s.

Nancy takes a deep breath, forcing down those thoughts. What’s done is done. There’s nothing she can do to stop the photos from going out to every pervert in the city who’s willing to pay top-dollar for photos of her and Steve skinny-dipping in their own fucking pool.

“Is there anything I can do to make this up to you?” Jonathan asks, eyes wide and concerned. 

Nancy looks down and realizes that her arms are crossed and tucked up against her ribs- a clear sign of discomfort or frustration on her part. Then she glances back up at Jonathan and just gives him a small smile.

“Come cuddle with me,” she says, patting the sofa next to her, and he looks like he wasnts to protest at how weak her answer was. Clearly he wants to do more to make it up to her. 

But at the end of the day, Nancy knows that he’s more willing to make her happy than to wallow in regret, so it only takes a couple of moments before he’s sliding onto the sofa next to her and curling up into her side.

“There we go,” Nancy says with a smile.

-

They’re at the President’s Ball for the Seventy Third Hunger Games and Nancy is trying not to pick at the clingy dark red fabric this year’s gown is made of. Her stylist insists on revealing gowns that emphasize her ‘delicate’ figure and expose all of the assets that the Capitolites insist on having their ways with. Nancy definitely prefers the clothing she gets to wear at home, the turtlenecks and plaid cardigans and pleated skirts and jeans. It’s clothing she feels comfortable in, clothing that makes her feel more like a human than just a convenient cut of meat.

She glances over at Steve, who has it nearly as bad as she does. His stylist insists on white silk button-ups that only have the bottom two buttons actually buttoned together, skinny blue leather pants, and red heeled boots, none of which really looks like the far more dorky Steve she knows and lo- cares for. At home Steve prefers windbreakers and polos, things that remind him of a nicer version of what they wear back in Seven.

Jonathan, on the other hand, has the freedom to wear more modest clothing. After all, the Capitol only cares about him for his story with Will, not his appearance. He’s not a pretty thing, meant to be stared at and devoured- his all-black suit is average, almost invisible, among Capitolites, and that’s how he likes it.

For a moment, Nancy is almost jealous of him, the fact that his only price to live his aftermath was his brother visiting the Capitol six times a year. No fucking, no training, no kill tests or tricks with Capitolites- just his brother visiting the Capitol every so often.

Nancy purses her lips. She can’t think like that. She can’t resent her boys for the things they can’t control, can’t resent Steve for fucking all those Capitolites, far more than her, thus giving him more Sponsorships, or Jonathan _not_ for fucking them.

“Hey, Nance,” a familiar voice coos, and she turns to find Steve holding up a plate of bread- solid and seed-pocked, like that from his home in northern Seven- with a wide, encouraging smile. “Want some?”

Nancy can’t help but smile at Steve as she forgets about the dress and the Capitolites for good half minute. She plucks a roll off of his plate and bites into it, letting the familiar flavors of his District roll across her tongue. “Thanks,” she says to Steve.

“No problem,” Steve says, something almost painful in his eyes. “After all, everything here is free for us.”

Yeah, that’s the one benefit of being a child-killer- you don’t have to pay for anything for the rest of your life as a Victor.

Nancy’s gaze travels across the room to the newest Victor, the One-Girl who she has learned is named Aurum. Aurum is dressed in a rather low-cut dress of deep purple, with sheer panels down her sides that expose far more of her skin than would ever be considered appropriate outside of the Capitol, and her golden curls are elevated above her head in a hairpiece of gold wire and purple jewels that almost resembles a crown. At seventeen-years-old, the girl is the same age as Steve was when he won and a year older than Nancy. The Capitol is going to have no problem conscripting this girl to be their plaything, and Aurum’s grown up training for this job, anyway.

That doesn’t make it any better, though, but at the end of the day whether you’re prepared or not doesn’t matter. Becoming the Capitol’s plaything- that’s the price of victory. Having to sell your body in order to survive the Capitol, in exchange for surviving the Arena. Girls like Nancy and Aurum, boys like Finnick and Steve, children made of blades and death, wrapped in pretty exteriors- the Capitol makes them pay for their appearances, for the food and comfort they now get to enjoy.

(At the end of the day, Nancy really should have realized just how much her and Steve’s secondary talents pay for, just how much they’re used and abused.)

-

For years, Nancy is stuck wondering how and why the President lets them get away with this relationship. After all, there are very few inter-District relationships that the Capitol lets stand, especially ones as high-profile is theirs.

She gets the horrific answer at a seemingly ordinary banquet a month after the President’s Ball. Jonathan's in the Capitol for once and and therefore her, Steve, and Jonathan can all attend together. They’re talking together in the corner of a room (for once in a blue moon, neither her nor Steve actually has a client scheduled for the evening) when the President himself stops next to them.

“Good evening, Mr. Byers, Mr. Harrington, Ms. Wheeler,” he says, voice as smooth as one of Four’s pearls, and Nancy has to keep herself from flinching. She remembers the way he’d crowned her, all those years ago, the way he’d sent her her first appointment with a smile, the way he’d threatened without having to say a word.

“Good evening, sir,” Steve says to her surprise as she and Jonathan just nod at the President in greeting. “How are you enjoying the Trinkets’ banquet tonight?”

“Quite a lot, sir,” Steve says, and Nancy notices how his posture has straightened spear-straight when greeting the President. “Thank you for asking.”

“Tonight, you’re to see their son, correct?” President Brenner says with a gleam in his eyes, but Steve didn’t have any names on his list for the night. Jonathan opens his mouth to make the correction- a fatal mistake if any- so Nancy wraps her hand around Jonathan’s as if in affection and digs her sharpened nails into his palm, effectively shutting him up.

“Of course, sir,” Steve says, voice calmer than most could achieve. “I’ll add that to my schedule immediately.”

“Good thing, young man.” President Brenner’s smile is more terrifying than Enobaria’s fangs have ever been. “After all, we wouldn't want anything to happen to Miss Wheeler or Mr. Byers here, would we?”

Nancy’s blood goes ice cold in her veins at the words. _This_ is what has kept Steve in the beds of Capitolites for the past couple of years? The two of them, her and Jonathan- they’re Steve’s blackmail.

Steve shakes his head, face kept carefully nonchalant. “No, we wouldn’t, sir,” he says, voice perfectly respectful, eyes full of nothing but deference.

(Steve’s always been the best of the three of them at being charming, at convincing others that he’s on their side.)

President Brenner smiles, and Nancy can smell his blood-breath from over here. “Good to know, Mr. Harrington,” he says, voice like the blade of the knives that Nancy used to kill innocent children. “It’s nice to see you all.” He smiles at the three of them before heading off to talk to some other Capitolites, leaving Steve to be stared at by Jonathan and Nancy, who grabs Steve and Jonathan’s hands and drags them into a nearby hallway.

“That's why they're letting us be together?” Nancy hisses as soon as the door closes behind them, “Because we're the bargaining chip they're using to control you and make you fuck those Capitolites?”

Steve's face is more closed off than she's ever seen it. “It's also to protect my cousin Robin,” he admits, voice quiet, “But yes.”

“Steve,” Jonathan says, voice cracking, but Nancy doesn’t flinch.

The more Nancy looks at it, the more Nancy gets it, that’s the worst part of it all. She understands the reasons why someone would allow themselves to be fucked by Capitolites, if it only means protecting your family. She did it herself, after all, for Mike and Holly and their mother. After their father died, it was all on her to make sure that her whole family was safe. Go in the Centre, become the Volunteer, win the Games. Then after the Games were over, she had to continue protecting them, no matter what. And that’s what she’s done.

Nancy guesses that she just never thought _she_ would be the bargaining chip, the person being protected. From the moment she heard that voice announce her the Victor of the Hunger Games, she’d always thought that she was going to have to be the one who was protecting everyone else, the person taking care.

To realize that Steve saw her as his own weakness, his own thing to protect- it strikes at some nasty, savage place in her chest that knows what it means to be willing to give every part of her body to protect the ones she loves. To know that Steve is willing to give the same things for her and Jonathan- well, it means more than words could say.

“Steve, you don’t have to do this,” Jonathan says, who has had his brother made into a Capitolite symbol but who has never had to sell his body to protect those he loves. “If we’re what he’s holding over you, then-”

Oh, Nancy sees where Jonathan’s about to head with this, what he’s about to ask Steve to do. Break up with them, in order to protect himself from being a whore.

(But she knows that Steve’s answer will be the same as her own.)

“I couldn't let them hurt you guys,” Steve says, eyes flashing, a strength to his voice that she only ever hears when it has to do with the two of them. She _really_ should have guessed who his leverage was. “You guys are the only things that make me happy in this fucked-up world we live in. I love you whether or not we're together. Breaking up would still leave the target on your backs. I would still fuck my way through a million Capitolites to keep you safe.”

Jonathan's eyes glisten. “I think that's the most romantic thing you've ever said to us,” he says, attempting a teasing tone, and Steve stares at him with the most absolutely lovesick look on his face, far more genuine and raw than any Capitol romance they’ve ever watched together.

Then, as if it’s the only way to possibly return that amount of raw, wrecked feeling, Jonathan steps forward and pulls Steve into a kiss. “I love you,” Jonathan says, and this isn’t the right place to say that, but is there a right place to say that? Is there ever going to be a right place to say that, when the Capitol is constantly breathing down their necks and the whole world feels unstable?

Steve smiles at both of them. “I love you too,” he says, grin carefree despite what they were just discussing, and Nancy swallows.

She sometimes hates so much that she loves them, that she cares about them. Because they are her vulnerabilities and she is theirs. They are each others’ bargaining chips, the things that the Capitol can use to force them into doing the things they would not choose to do otherwise.

(She knows that even in the worst possible circumstances- if her brother, sister, and mother died- she’d still be the Capitol’s plaything if only it kept Jonathan and Steve alive.)

Nancy leans in, gives Jonathan and Steve each a quick peck on the cheek. “I love you idiots too,” she says, and they both smile at her, Jonathan’s smile soft, Steve’s grin brilliant.

By Panem, she could stay like this forever, just the three of them, bitter and broken and beloved, where every action they take is dictated within the three of them, not by any outside force. As soon as they leave this hallway, life will revert back to normal, but for now- it’s just them. Just this.

And for the next couple of hours, they do.

-

In order to get permission to go to District Six for Joyce Byers and Jim Hopper's wedding (taking place about halfway between the Victory Tour and the next Games, in the middle of Spring), Steve ends up having work for two weeks straight. Nancy doesn’t see him home once in those two weeks, and she doesn’t bite her nails like she used to when she was just a kid pre-Centre, but she does spend a lot of time staring at walls and playing mind-numbing games on her tablet and watching Steve’s stupid Capitol romances and occasionally going to an appointment of her own.

Nancy ends up kissing him for half an hour straight when they both get on the train at the Capitol station, and as they curl up on the sofa on the way to Six she ignores the dark circles under his eyes that his fading Capitol makeup can’t hide.

“You know that Jonathan is going to hate himself for this,” she says, her fingers ghosting over the bruises on his wrists that even the Capitol’s Remake couldn’t entirely get rid of, and Steve just shrugs, giving her a half-smile.

“Ah, he’ll get over it,” Steve says, and Nancy knows that Jonathan will, but that doesn’t mean that Jonathan won’t feel guilty in the meantime.

Sure enough, the first thing Jonathan says when he greets the two of them at the train platform in Six is: “You didn’t have to do this.”

“I wouldn't miss it for the world,” Steve says with a small smile, and Nancy knows that he’s telling the truth, that he would have done this a million times over to be with Jonathan and Nancy and their families. She would have done the same, after all.

Over the course of their weekend in Six, Nancy gets to meet Will again and then Joyce Byers and Hopper and Hopper’s daughter Jane for the first time. Jonathan introduces her and Steve with a proud smile, and Nancy expects looks of revulsion from his family but she doesn’t get them. Instead, Joyce hugs her and Hopper shakes her hand and Jane, who’s a year younger than Mike and Will, looks up at her with wide eyes and says, “You’re really pretty,” with a smile.

(For the first time in years, the word ‘pretty’ doesn’t make Nancy wince, not when it’s coming from the mouth of Jonathan’s little stepsister.)

“So are you,” Nancy says in reply with a smile, and Jane lights up. Nancy’s chest warms at the girl’s clear admiration- she very rarely gets that from people of the Districts. Even in Two, where they respect her win, very few citizens have pure admiration due to her time in the Capitol.

It’s rather nice to be honestly liked, Nancy determines.

-

That night, as they’re all lying in Jonathan’s bed in Six’s Victor’s Village- which, somehow, without her and Steve ever visiting, was ordered big enough for three people to sleep in- Jonathan speaks up.

“Have you guys ever imagined getting married?” Jonathan asks softly into the dim light. Even in the Village, Six never gets properly dark, just like the Capitol- the lights from factories and the City right nearby prevents such a thing.

“Maybe a little,” Steve says into Jonathan’s neck. Jonathan’s in the middle, with Steve and Nancy on either side. “I mean, I know that we can’t get legally married or anything, but there are some ways to do a triple marriage in Seven that just don’t make their way into the books.”

“How do you get married in Seven?” Jonathan asks, curiosity piqued.

“Each family chops down a long tree branch- the straightest and best they can find- and then you line up the branches right next to each other for the couple or triple to jump over. Then the couple or the triple dances together and with everyone else, then you sign the papers and have your wedding night fun. What about you guys, in Two or Six?”

“We give each other rocks,” Nancy says with a fond smile, “Not diamonds like in the Capitol, but each person getting married finds a rock that they think best represents the other person, usually a rock no bigger than your fist, and you give it to the other person. People carry them around in their left pant pocket or, if there’s a risk of losing it on the job, leave it under their pillows during the day. The rocks are usually worthless except for sentimental value, so no one ever steals them. She glances at Jonathan, willing to continue Steve and Jonathan’s questions. “And you, Jonathan?”

“In Six, it’s mostly just about the paperwork and two-day break from work after the wedding, you know, like you saw today,” Jonathan explains, “But sometimes a married couple will go down to one of the factories they work at and screw in two bolts onto the same vehicle together, as a symbol that they’ve done something together.”

“Do you ever imagine doing those things, well, together?” Jonathan prods, and Nancy’s heart skips a beat. She imagines giving Jonathan and Steve rocks (a smooth, gray one with a bit of a shine for Jonathan, a more rectangular one filled with color for Steve), jumping over the tree branches, screwing in some bolts side-by-side.

She imagines promising her life to them, just like she’s pretty much already done by using her body to protect them, by opening up her apartment to them, by loving them every day of her life since she met them.

“President Brenner would never let it happen,” she says, because marriages have rules, such as no sleeping with anyone outside of it, and the Capitolites might have no problem sleeping with her or Steve while they’re in a relationship but Capitolites had strangely traditional views on marriage and very few of them would want to sleep with her or Steve after they were married, which the dear president would hate. There’s also the fact that triple marriages, while decently common in the Districts, are nowhere near recognized legally, just as any same-sex marriage is also unrecognized.

“But, if we could?” Jonathan asks, and Steve’s the one who loves romance, but Jonathan’s always been the most idealistic of them when it comes to reality, the one least bound by President Brenner’s whims. “Would you?”

Nancy glances over the faces of her boys, dimly-lit by the lights of District Six out the window of Jonathan’s bedroom. She thinks about their apartment in the Capitol, with its myriad of small plants and the sofa and bed specially bought to fit the three of them perfectly and the collection of stones by the door and the photos lining the hallways. She thinks about how long they’ve been together, the connections they share that so few others do, the ways that they care about and understand each other. She thinks about the nightmares that they hold each other through, the dreams they share in whispers, the quiet moments together that keep her sane and happy.

“Some day, yes,” she says eventually, and she’s greeted by wide smiles from both of her boyfriends.

“Sounds like a plan,” Steve says, pressing a kiss to Jonathan’s neck while reaching a hand over Jonathan to intertwine his fingers with Nancy’s.

Jonathan smiles. “I’m onboard.”

Something cold splinters and melts inside Nancy’s chest. Yeah, she’s happy.

-

The Seventy Fourth Hunger Games rolls around, and here comes Katniss Everdeen, the Girl on Fire, who the Capitol coos over after she Volunteers but Nancy can’t help but think that _Jonathan did it first_. The Capitol eventually seems to agree with her, up until the moment that the Twelve-Boy opens his mouth and confesses his love for her.

Yeah, Nancy can practically feel Two’s tributes’ chances drop as that star-crossed lovers story spills across the Capitol, overtaking the usual narratives about traditional villains and anti-heroes and who’s capable and who’s not. The Capitol, as easily shown by Steve’s romances, love a good fairytale love story- complete with blood and gore and evil villains- that they can coo over.

(Nancy thinks that Steve would have enjoyed the Twelve-Girl and Twelve-Boy’s love story in any other circumstances, just like he does many love stories, if the tributes from Twelve weren’t actively crushing any chance his tributes had at making it.)

So the actual Games begin, and this time, every one of Steve and Jonathan’s kids dies in the Bloodbath. Not too much of a shock, but it does mean that both of Nancy’s boys are in the apartment by the end of the night, curled into her sides. For a few days, nothing too exciting happens, with the usual outliers getting picked off by the Careers and the Twelve-Boy, up until the moment that the Eleven-Girl and the Twelve-Girl blow up the Career’s food supplies.

It’s at this moment that Nancy winces and leans in closer. It’s not exactly taking advantage of the Arena to win as it was the Three-Boy who’d originally messed with the mines, but it skirts a bit too close to how she won to be completely comfortable. If the Eleven-Girl wasn’t twelve-years-old and the Twelve-Girl didn’t have her star-crossed lovers story, Nancy would worry about how the President would retaliate against them, what he would force them to do to make up for humiliating the Gamemakers.

Then, in quick succession, the Two-Boy snaps the Three-Boy’s neck, the One-Boy skewers the Eleven-Girl and the Twelve-Girl puts an arrow straight through the One-Boy’s neck, and now they’re down to the Final Seven, just like that. Both Twelves, both Twos, the Five-Girl, the Eleven-Boy, and the Ten-Boy, who’s barely been shown over the past couple of weeks but hasn’t shown up in the Tribute to the Fallen, either.

And then there’s the fucking rule change, and Nancy doesn’t know how to feel about it, other than somehow Two’s tributes’ chances have gone even further down the shitter than they were before, despite the fact that there’s arguably a possibility for them _both_ to win, now.

Within the next few days, the Twelves show the Capitol just how in love they are with the Twelve-Girl nursing her boy back to health, then the feast happens and the Two-Girl dies. (The Two-Girl was Brutus’ girl this year, as skilled with knives as Nancy with even more bloodlust than Enobaria.) The Eleven-Boy spares the life of the girl on fire, who then runs off to find lover boy again.

The rest of the Final Six isn’t that extaordinary. The Two-Boy kills the Eleven-Boy as revenge for Clove’s death, then slices open the throat of the Ten-Boy when he makes the mistake of hobbling down from his treetop camp without watching his surroundings. They’re down to the Final Four- the Two-Boy, the Five-Girl, and the two Twelves- and then the Five-Girl makes the mistake of eating on the same poisonous berries that took out two tributes during Claudius’ Games, two years before Nancy’s. Then it’s down to the Final Three, the Twelve tributes and the Two-Boy, and then the horror-movie mutts come, and-

Nancy can’t sleep the entire night as Cato- not the Two-Boy, not when he’s screaming in agony as the mutts slowly rip him apart- is slowly shredded to pieces. She curls up on the sofa, the blood of her own kills mixing with Cato’s screams, and at least she killed those kids quick, with cannon booms seconds later, unlike this poor kid. She just sits here and watches with glassy eyes, nausea keeping her from eating and horror keeping her from sleeping.

(She can just imagine Lyme sitting in the Mentor seat, watching her boy die one of the most slow, agonizing deaths that Nancy has ever seen in the Games. Nancy’s not very close with any of the Two-Victors, but she wouldn’t wish such a Mentorship on anyone. At least Daphne died after only a single blow to the skull- it might have been messy, but it was quick.)

Jonathan and Steve bracket her, unable to sleep either, though they do occasionally leave the sofa to eat or to drink something. Cato’s not their District’s, but he’s still a tribute, just like they were. Together, the three of them watch this boy’s dying screams and moans, flinching and grimacing and occasionally letting out a small groan of their own as blood-soaked nightmares of their own Games get flung up in their faces.

Then, as the sun is rising, Katniss Everdeen- because in this moment, she’s not the Twelve-Girl anymore, she’s Katniss, who could have given Cato a mercy kill but didn’t until he’d suffered through the entire night- shoots an arrow into Cato’s head, thankfully _finally_ putting an end to the boy’s suffering, and Nancy can finally take a deep breath again. Jonathan lets out a small, choked sound. Nancy nearly raises an eyebrow- usually Steve’s the least callous one among them- but maybe the sheer length of the time of Cato’s suffering is what’s doing Jonathan in this time.

Now it’s only Katniss and the Twelve-Boy, the one who’s in love with her.

Nancy’s hands are in Jonathan and Steve’s when the two tributes threaten suicide. That’s not something that ever happens in the Games- tributes commit suicide constantly, but they normally achieve it by running into the Cornucopia or eating poisonous berries early on, not in the _Final Two_ , and certainly not _together_.

Oh, Nancy’s quickly reassessing what’s going to happen to the Twelves after the Games are over. There’s no way that the Capitol is going to let them get away with a stunt like this. There are going to be repercussions, there are going to be punishments, there is going to be hell to-

The berries touch their lips and Seneca Crane’s voice booms out across their apartment’s speakers, announcing both of them as Victors.

Oh, shit.

-

That night, after the interviews with the giggling killer in the candlelight gown and her blushing lover boy, Nancy dreams of snarling mutts and slit throats and a thorned bat bashing in the heads of children. She dreams of Jonathan and Steve getting trapped under the maws of mutts, of them screaming her name through gurgling, blood-choked throats, and over top of all of this she can hear President Brenner’s voice cooing, “Now, Miss Wheeler, we wouldn’t want this to happen to dear Mr. Byers and Mr. Harrington, do we?”

She awakes with a scream trapped behind her teeth and hair plastered to her scalp with sweat, and the only thing that calms her is Steve and Jonathan on either side of her in the bed, her arm draped over Steve and Jonathan’s arm around her waist. Steve’s breath is against her cheek and she is reminded that they are alive, and safe, and no longer in that fucking Arena.

-

For six months, everything goes back to normal, but there’s a strange tension in the air as they lead into the Victory Tour. This year is the first year that there are _two_ Victors going on the Tour, two Victors giving speeches, two Victors to hold and comfort each other through the nightmares.

For Nancy, she’s almost happy for them, but she can’t help but feel just a little bit of resentment for the nightmares that she and Jonathan and Steve had to suffer through alone. The lovers from Twelve have each other on that train in a way that no other Victor ever has.

She shouldn’t resent them. She _should_ resent them. Fuck it, Nancy doesn’t know how to feel. They’re Victors, which makes them a small category of people that she can relate to like very few others, but they’re also paired Victors, a category which makes them as singular as Nancy in her status as the only Two-Victor-Whore.

But while the Districts- other than Two, who never forgive her for what she didn’t do for Cato- see Katniss as a hero, they saw Nancy as a monster and a traitor.

So yes, she resents that fact. She resents the fact that she Volunteered for the same reasons as Katniss and Jonathan- to protect the innocent children that never should have been Reaped in the first place- but that she was cast as a villain while they were cast as heroes for doing the exact same thing-

Nancy takes a deep breath. She’s getting distracted, again, away from her life with Steve and Jonathan, where she’s happy and not dwelling on the world outside of their apartment.

Katniss and her Twelve-Boy aren’t her problem. The President will make them get married, live happy lives together, and then there will be another Games for the Quell and Nancy won’t have to deal with all of the sticky questions they bring with them ever again.

-

Or, well, that _was_ the plan.

Nancy lives in the Capitol. So does Steve. They don’t really get news of what’s building up in the Districts as a result of the stunt that Katniss and Peeta pulled in their Games.

But Jonathan only lives half of his time here. He comes back every two weeks, lips pressed into a thin line, with small, carefully worded stories about life back in Six. About the small-scale rebellions that the Capitol never talks about. (The ones that Nancy doesn’t see when she goes back to Two for the Victory Tour, but that Steve definitely sees in Seven when he goes back for his own stop on the Victory Tour.)

Nancy knows that everything is boiling, that something is going to break. It just has to.

(Damn the girl from Twelve for sparking a fire rather than letting the embers cool into ash.)

-

Then the announcement for the Quarter Quell is set to be made, and Nancy and Steve and Jonathan are all sitting on the sofa, Nancy perched with her legs crossed in the middle while Steve sprawls on her left and Jonathan sits rigidly on her right.

President Brenner smiles as he opens his mouth to speak, and an indescribable sense of dread sinks into Nancy’s stomach. Her fingers tighten around Steve’s and Jonathan’s, one hand on each side, and Steve turns to ask her what’s wrong but she _shushs_ him.

(The Quarter Quell is never any good. It’s always, always worse than the usual Games, and she and Jonathan and Steve know those Games better than anyone save the other seventy one people who have survived them. She knows that what is going to come is going to be utterly horrific, even if she has no idea what it will be.)

“As a reminder that no ties, not even the ties of privilege or family, can stand against the might of Capitol,” President Brenner says, “This year’s Tributes will be Reaped from the age-eligible names of relatives of Victors. Their Mentors will be their Victor relatives.”

Someone’s screaming, now- Nancy can hear it through the roar of blood in her ears. There are very few Victors from a lot of the outlier Districts, and many of them only have one or two relatives, max, who fit the age requirements of the Reaping. Which means that-

“Will’s going in,” Jonathan moans beside her, curling in on himself. “Jane’s going in.” Because Jonathan’s brother and stepsister are the only two age-eligible names of relatives of Victors in the entirety of District Six, which only has him, Javerne, Phillips, and Cris as Victors, and Javerne and Phillips are orphans while Cris only has a seven-year-old daughter.

“So is Robin,” Steve breathes, like if he says it any louder he’ll break someone’s heart (probably his own).

And as for Nancy, well- there’s a chance that it won’t be Mike, but not much of one. Most District Two Victors don’t have families, and even fewer have relatives that fit the age restrictions. Of age-eligible male tributes, there’s just Mike, twelve-year-old Jamie (Enobaria’s nephew), and fifteen-year-old Peter (Nero’s son).

She’s the one who screamed, she now realizes. She’s the one who let loose a blood-curdling scream, because this can’t be happening, because her brother and Jonathan’s brother and sister and Steve’s cousin are going into an Arena that they all fought to survive just so shit like this wouldn’t happen.

“Fuck,” she says, because that’s all she can say, because the reason she became a Victor, the reason she became a whore, is about to enter the Arena.

Jonathan scrambles up from the sofa. “I’ve gotta get to Six,” he says, eyes desperate, and that boy who Volunteered for his brother isn’t here, because that boy can’t Volunteer anymore, and years of work are about to go down the shitter.

Nancy’s carefully constructed world is falling apart. The thing that originally bound her and Jonathan together, that has bound her and Jonathan and Steve together for years, now- the desire to protect the ones they love- is about to tear them apart, she knows it. After all, only one tribute can become a Victor, and she loves Will and Jane, she does, but if she’s forced to choose then Mike’s going to be the one to survive.

(This relationship was always built to fall apart, she knew, but she’d stopped bracing herself for it and this just hurts that much worse because of it.)

She stands up from her seat on the couch, needing to get out of here, needing to escape the implosion of her relationship. She needs to get a breath, plan a way to train Mike, find a way to make sure that her family doesn’t collapse because she couldn’t save her little brother.

Then Steve grabs her hand, his fingers as gentle as they were years ago. “Wait,” he says, and she turns to see that he has a hand on Jonathan’s wrist as well. “We can’t hate each other. We can’t let them tear us apart like this. We’re going to figure this out, okay? We’ve been in there, we’ve gotten out. We know how to win. We’re going to figure out a way to make sure that this arena doesn’t destroy us.”

There are tears in Jonathan’s eyes. “And how do you suppose we do that?”

“Well,” Steve says, and she knows the panic in his eyes despite the way he’s regulating his voice, keeping his tone calm for the two of them. He’s just as scared as they are, even if he’s trying to hide it. “We’re going to make our kids allies. They’ve got a better chance together than they do apart.”

Nancy knows that she, Steve, and Jonathan all won their Games nearly solo- the two boys more than her, to be sure, but she still made most of her kills alone- but that he does have a point. After all, their siblings and cousins aren’t killers or fighters. They’re going to need all the help they can get. And if they’re allied, she, Jonathan, and Steve can work together to save all of them.

So Nancy lets out a bitter laugh. “When did you get so smart?”

There’s something very, very weary sitting in Steve’s eyes that ages him far beyond his mere twenty one years of age. “When I won the Hunger Games and learned to survive being the Capitol’s plaything,” he says, and there’s something ugly and bitter in his voice that she understands, something she feels reflected in her own heart everyday.

“Alright, then,” Nancy says, “Our kids are allies. Now we just have to make sure one of them wins.”

Nancy's mind races as she thinks through their options. She wasn't a Career for nothing after all. She spent six years in the Centre before she was chosen to volunteer. She knows how to compare advantages and disadvantages, to draw from the strengths and weaknesses of the tributes around her.

Nancy starts to plot. She definitely has Robin, Mike, Jane, and Will under her belt for an alliance, and maybe whatever tribute is Reaped as the Two Girl as well. She might be able to scoop up the boy tribute from Seven as well, and it's not going to be a career pack, not by any means, but there's got to be some way that you can scrape up some sort of killing instinct or weapons proficiency from the tributes she does have.

Jonathan bites his lip as he gives the smallest of nods to them. “I’ll leave for Six in the morning,” Jonathan says, letting Steve pull him back in, letting himself fall back onto the couch. Seconds later Nancy follows, curling inward toward Steve, who is now in the middle of the couch. Within a minute, her head’s on Steve’s shoulder and Jonathan’s head is in Steve’s lap and they’re all clutching at each other, trying to calm their racing hearts.

Over the next few months, she’ll plan and scheme and do everything fucking possible to get sponsors for the tributes on her list, whether or not Mike is with them. The Victor _will_ come from Two, Six, or Seven, Nancy’s going to make damn sure of it.

For the rest of tonight, though, she doesn’t focus on the upcoming Games. Instead, she just curls up with Jonathan and Steve and lets the world fall to the side, focusing on the boys beside her rather than the looming danger ahead.

-

Then it's a few months later and Nancy is standing with the rest of them Victors on the reaping stage, knowing that if it’s Mike’s name comes out of that bowl that she's going to be his Mentor. 

The girls go first, just like they did in Nancy’s year, and Billy's younger sister Max is picked, but Billy doesn't even flinch. Neither does his little sister, who went into the Centre just a couple of years after he did.

Then it's the boys, and Nancy doesn't mean to hold her breath but she does anyway, trying not to think about her own Mentor standing right next to her. One of their boys has a ⅔ chance of going into the arena against Nero’s boy, and either way it’s going to hurt.

Serena, their escort, pulls out the boys’ name, and Nancy's ears are ringing so loudly that she barely even hears it but it _does_ register.

Moments later a boy with raven hair joins them onstage, and it's been six years since she last saw him in the Justice Building, but that's her brother. That's Mike, with his too-long hair and knobbly knees and long fingers that are nowhere near fit for knife throwing, unlike hers. There are no Volunteers, this year- he’s going in, with her as a Mentor.

And Nancy’s never brought home a Victor before. She had her one shot, and she failed. Up against Victors like Mags or Cashmere or even Haymitch Abernathy, who just brought home his first Victors this year, she's woefully underprepared.

Within a month, her little brother is going to either die or watch as Will Byers and Jane Hopper and Robin Harrington all die instead. Whatever the ending is, it’s not one she wants to witness, but it’s one that she’s going to have to watch anyway.

-

When Nancy steps onto the train- she doesn’t have to go into the Justice Building to say goodbye to Mike as she’ll be spending the next few weeks with him- she finds her mentor sitting at the table already, her boots propped up on the table and a knife balanced between her fingers.

“What are you doing here?” Nancy asks, sincerely surprised. She thought that she was going to have to do this one alone, just as she has had to do everything nearly alone for years.

“I’m coming in an advisory capacity,” Enobaria says, smile flashing, and Nancy raises an eyebrow.

“What?”

“Two privilege and a couple of loopholes for the Quell,” Enobaria says, “Or did you really think that I would let my Victor go through this alone?”

Nancy doesn’t hug Enobaria, though it’s a close thing. She knows that Enobaria hates physical contact, hates any sort of touch save sparring, but Nancy is practically bleeding gratitude. She’ll have to put her brother up against Robin and Will and Jane in the Arena, but at least her Mentor is going to be by Nancy’s side, helping guide her through everything.

(After six years alone, at least she has this with Enobaria.)

“Alright, then,” Nancy says, “Let’s do this.”

-

A week and a half later, on the morning that the Quarter Quell is set to begin, Nancy wakes up in a hovercraft. Her immediate response is utter panic as, after all, the last time she was on a hovercraft was when she was pulled, bloodied and bruised, from her Arena.

Her panic only subsides a little when she sees Jonathan lying on a bed next to her, face peaceful in sleep, and Mike- who was set to go into the Arena within a few hours, last she checked- laying in a bed next to Jonathan, snoring away like she remembers him doing even when they were kids. Mike doesn’t have a wound on him, and for a moment she’s not entirely sure if that’s because he hasn’t fought yet or because they’ve already Remade him after he’s won. On Nancy’s other side is Will Byers, familiar from years of visits.

“You’re on a District 13 hovercraft,” a familiar voice says, and she sits up a bit to see Murray, one of the more batshit Victors in recent memory- a tribute from Ten, he somehow still nearly lost his mind in the Arena despite his training with lifestock- looking the most sane she thinks he’s ever looked. “We rescued nearly all of the Mentors and tributes this year.”

“District 13?” Nancy asks, always calculating, always observing. She wants answers, just as she always has, even back in the training Centre in Two. She didn’t win her Games by being an idiot, after all.

“The Rebellion,” Murray specifies. “They’ve been lying in wait for the chance for seventy five years, now. The Girl on Fire gave them that push that they needed.”

Alright, that’s important to note. A rebellion that’s been laying in wait for seventy five years, letting over a thousand children die in horrific Games, letting the remaining Victors rot in the Capitol and the villages, turned into alcoholics and whores and Morphlants. A District that has let the rest of the Districts suffer in agony for seventy five years without raising a hand to help.

Then Nancy’s brain turns over his first statement- _nearly_ all of the tributes and Mentors. Her blood goes cold when she notices the one person she loves who is missing, dismissing all thoughts of District 13 temporarily from her brain. “Where’s Steve?” she demands, trying to keep the anxiety down. He might be in another room, after all, right? He might have gotten rescued separately-

The look on Murray’s face threatens to shatter her. “We didn’t get him out,” he says, “Along with Robin Harrington, Dustin and Mags Henderson, and Erica, Lucas, and Seeder Sinclair. The Capitol got to them before we could.”

In this moment, Nancy could give less than a shit about the Rebellion, about District 13, when all she can think about is Steve trapped in the Capitol, where they can keep him as their whore and do far worse than she can even imagine.

(Oh, she knows that being the Capitol’s fucktoy is bad, but she also knows that she and Steve and Jonathan have escaped the worst of what the Capitol can do. Their families are safe. They haven’t been punished excessively for any perceived wrongdoings. There have been plenty of Victors that have disappeared over the years, who have turned up dead after “accidents” with their arms slit or ODing on drugs they didn’t take. There are Victors whose bodies are manipulated after they leave the Arena, ones like Enobaria who woke up after the Arena with her mouth sliced open by the teeth they’d given her while she was knocked out.

What might happen to Steve while they have him- Nancy can’t say.)

“We are going to get Steve back,” Nancy says as Jonathan blinks awake at her. “We’re going to get him out.” Jonathan’s expression cycles quickly through confusion, shock, horror, and then determination before she turns to Murray. “Gimme a fucking gun,” she demands, “I’m gonna take the whole fucking system apart if it means saving him.”

And Murray grins that half-insane smile at her. “Glad to hear it, Wheeler.”

“I’m not as good with a gun,” Jonathan says, voice quiet but firm, and she turns to look at her other boyfriend, the one she knows is alive and healthy and here. There’s a determined glint in his eyes that she hasn’t seen since that first day they had Steve in their kitchen as they talked about sleeping with each other for the first time, a set to his shoulders that she hasn’t seen since the day he Volunteered for Will. She finds herself thinking about that fact, their shared Volunteerism, the way he fought like she did in that Arena, and she knows that there is no one she’d rather have by her side to save Steve than Jonathan. “But I’m going to help. I’m _not_ going to let him suffer. I’m going to help you save him.”

Nancy smiles, and something in the motion reminds her, oh so distantly, of her own Mentor, all those years ago, because her smile isn’t pleasant. It’s a predator’s smile, a deadly smile, one that Nancy intends on following through with. “Good,” she says, because Jonathan’s out of practice but once upon a time, he was skilled with a knife. She’s sure that he could become skilled with other weapons, too, what with his adaptability and all.

(Nancy Wheeler may be pretty, and she may a whore, but she is a Two first and foremost. She survived the Arena and she survived the Capitol and she is a mountain, just like any Two Victor, and she will not bend, not anymore, not for anyone.)

They’re going to get Steve out. There’s just no question about it.

_We are not defined by the things we do in order to survive. We do not apologize for them._

_Maybe they have broken you, but you are a sharper weapon because of it._

_And it is time to strike._

**-Laura Sebastian**

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you guys all enjoyed this fic! Feel free to leave a comment and kudos if you liked it- comments are a writer's lifeblood, after all. Thanks for reading!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Games Are Never Over](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20595665) by [AuthorInDistress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuthorInDistress/pseuds/AuthorInDistress)




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